Heavenly Tea Leaves

#tiffanys2021sipdown Tea #135 overall / Tea #6 for April

Monday 04/05/21 — Heavenly Tea Leaves CHOCOLATE ROOIBOS MINT from December 2018 Sipsby box. Cold brew pitcher. Hint of chocolate, hint of sweetness (apple?), hint of rooibos. Another one I could’ve put in the giveaway pile, but I like to keep it within a year or two unless person knows the tea is from X date. In the craziness of my life to support my tea habit you drink this for refreshment and move on.

#tiffanydrinkstea #tiffanys2021 #tiffanysfaves #tiffanyinthe614 #tiffanysteasipdown #sipdownchallenge

I have been a English breakfast drinker for years and have completely switched to this blend of French Breakfast. It has a natural sweetness with a hint of vanilla that accents the black tea perfectly. The rose gives it such a smooth taste too.

I usually add a small splash of almond milk (its great without too) and thats it, no sugar needed. It really has added some magic into my mornings. I even got my sister hooked, I can’t recommend it enough.

Fantastic pu-erh tuo cha. I love pu0erh i know a lot of people do not, but i think this tea is amazing.

I really enjoyed this for iced tea. It has a tart flavor reminiscent of cranberry juice, but milder. I would reccomned it.

Love this tea! It has a subtle sweetness of white tea with fruity notes as well. Great blend.

This one is from my March Sips By box.

Heavenly Tea Leaves’s website lists lemon peel as an ingredient, but I don’t see any in my sample. All I see are black tea leaves and lemongrass. But I certainly smell lemon peel! There is a very distinct, realistic lemon aroma, as opposed to lemon verbena or lemongrass. Mmm.

I was brushing my teeth while this steeped and didn’t hear the timer ding. So I think I steeped this somewhere between 3.5 and 4 minutes. Even with a little extra time, it comes out pretty light in color compared to other black teas. Steeped, the lemon fragrance is SO strong! Almost like I’m smelling the fresh cut fruit.

The flavor is not exactly what was promised by the aroma. The lemongrass is bright and present, but there’s also some weird note. It kind of reminds me of those chalky Valentines Day heart candies with the phrases on them. Like if those were lemon flavor. Or PEZ! Yes, lemon Pez. And even with 3 teaspoons of tea for 24 ounces, this is a little weak. I’d go with 4 next time for sure. All around, I am not impressed. Ajiri’s lemon black tea is much, much better.

An interesting tea. I don’t think I like it much though. I love coconut but the lime peel is doing something bitter even with the added sweetener. Glad I don’t have more, but it’s going into the free tea pile at work.

This was from my March 2019 Sips By box.

This definitely was a berry tea, but leaned more towards a cranberry taste than blueberry. Still, it was light, refreshing, and very good. Not a bitter leaf in the infuser, and a little apple flavor as it settled in.

I picked this tea up because it seemed like the perfect Autumn treat. It had very pleasant aromatics of cinnamon spice that relaxed me and made me recall having cinnamon apple cider and playing in the fallen leaves as a child. Because of this, I decided to enjoy it in a beige mug with a warm brown rim that has been in the cupboard for my entire life. The actual tea steeped more quickly than I had anticipated, and was a lovely dark color. The taste was very nostalgic with earthy cinnamon and a light aftertaste of orange. As I enjoyed my tea, I reflected on how many Autumns I have been through (21!) and how tea has been present for the entirety of my life. I thoroughly enjoyed the cup, not only for its flavor, but for its ability to drift me through my memories.

I have to be honest. I didn’t expect much out of the teas that I got from this company, since they were teas that some people who work for me randomly picked online and sent me for Christmas.

Initially they sent a sampler of green teas and I’m not really a green girl, so I took a chance and emailed the company to ask if I could exchange them. The customer service was great. They didn’t even charge me shipping back and were really accommodating about the exchange. Score one!

I bought the sampler that has flavored blacks. I am getting to the point where this lemon is one of my go to teas. It’s really delicious! I was surprised at the POW of flavor since the dry leaf didn’t smell like much. But it is really there. Loving it.

I got a set of teas from Heavenly Tea Leaves for a gift and I’m glad I did because flavored teas are not something I have been buying for myself ,,,but this tea really changed my mind.
I did lower the temperature down to 195F to brew and I think that in the past when I first started drinking tea, I just unknowingly poured boiling water onto all teas (( and they were usually flavored teas too that you started out with.))
Well this mix had lovely flavor. It was subtle strawberry and cream with notes of coconut and you could still taste the white tea.
It was also very pretty with rose petals in pink and light green colors to the white tea leaves. The fruit pieces had a light peachy orange color so the mix looked so pretty as it steeped.
I got a gift set and all of the teas I received were in tea tins that you could see thru the top and labels on each tea.
I really enjoyed this fruit tea and it makes me want to explore more flavored teas in the future.

Yeah, this is tired and old. I found a tin of it here at work and I thought I’d try it. It’s so old, though, that it’s no longer on their website.

It makes a beautiful looking infusion, but it’s just MEH to drink. It’s old, rather bland, not very lemony anymore. The Rooibos is there, but that tastes old and sad, too.

I’m not giving this a ranking or anything because this just doesn’t count.

I got this tea as a christmas gift. It is a good green tea. It has a smooth and mild smoky flavor. The liquid is a yellow amber color. This tea has one flaw. It is a little bit picky with the temperature and steeping time.

I liked it. It tasted lovely and sweet with a bit of milk, nothing too fancy, just right.

So there I have found a trend in my friends who work for record labels. They know I’m a tea lover. So I was mentioning how puerh is my favorite type of tea. So on my desk is a puerh sampler from my friend in Nashville. One of the many reasons I love my job. I have never met a tuo cha I didn’t like. I think tuo chas must be one of those things that is hard to screw up. What I love about tuo cha puerh is that I can at least get 5-6 good steeps out one bird nest. This does not disappoint. The brew is dark like coffee and smooth like the little man’s bottom. That might be a bad analogy but we’ll roll with it. So smooth and six good steeps….huzzah!

so i’m not too big into green tea. for the most part, i find green tea a little too leafy and grassy tasting. the exception would be jasmine pearls, which i recently found out i’m kinda in love with…but i digress.

this tastes like the epitome of green tea to me. vegetal and slightly bitter with a fair amount of astringency. refreshing and clean, but overall a bit boring. it seems decent quality, but i’m no green tea connoisseur. i don’t mind drinking it, but it’s not like i’ll be buying it again.

The website for this tea company seems to be working again, so I went back to compare the description with the taste and smell. I’m not sure where the peonies and chrysanthemums flavours they’re talking about are hiding, because they’re certainly not in the tea. I never got the peppery note either.

Oh well. Rating remains the same. Pleasant, but not mind-blowing.

I’m new to drinking tea, I’ll readily admit it. When I open my tea and smell it, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking for in terms of scents. My nose knows two settings: Good Smell and Bad Smell.

Even so, I was quickly able to tell that this tea is definitely lacking.

“What do you smell?” I asked my boyfriend, who knows even less about teas than I do. “Because I can swear that’s chocolate at the very bottom. Maybe nuts? It’s kinda bland smelling.”

“I don’t think my nose is any better than yours,” he told me. “It just smells kind of run-of-the-mill tea to me. Maybe a little chocolate but it’s faint.”

“Faint” is definitely the word I’d use. Everything about the smell was faint. Even so, I started to steep it.

Aaaand there was not a lot going on. The instructions said to steep a tsp for two minutes at boiling for 6-8oz. (They didn’t say much else, mind you.) The water wasn’t boiling (but close), but I steeped it 3 minutes. I stuck my nose into the mug, but it smelled even fainter now. Maybe straw? If I smelled really hard, I could almost get the scent of chocolate again. I’m fairly sure I was imagining it, though.

It tasted liked it smelled. I could almost smell the malt prior to steeping the tea, but I wasn’t tasting it at all. It was pleasant enough, but nondescript. I didn’t taste any of the subtlety that people cite when talking about oolong. It was just kind of… there. There was almost an aftertaste to it that seemed like it could have been pleasant, but it was faint.

I thought I might have under-brewed it, so I put the tea ball in for another minute before continuing to drink. It certainly tasted stronger, but now it tasted overwhelmingly like straw. Too much brewing?

I had to chuck the whole thing out. I tried brewing the next cup similarly to the first cup, only at four and a half minutes, but all I tasted was water with a hint of tea. Not one for multiple brews, then.

On tossing the contents of the tea ball, I noticed the leaves smelt of damp cardboard. Ugh. Maybe they sell musty tea.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong. And if I am, please correct me. I want to learn! But for me, this tea rates as a mindless drink. Pleasant, but shallow. Alternatively, a good oolong to mix with other teas!

PS – To make sure my and my boyfriend’s noses don’t actually suck at picking up subtlety, I rummaged around the cupboard to sniff our Rishi Chocolate Chai. We could definitely pick up a lot of scents. Sure, we could just suck at picking it up in plain teas, but we don’t have any plain tea to test that theory, apart from the Heavenly Tea Leaves oolong sampler. Mystery for another time.